never tell me the odds
by fairy-prose
Summary: "Do you know just how unlikely this is?" He sounds thoughtful, and the words roll off his tongue slowly, leisurely, like he's analyzing the taste of each one as he pronounces it.


It's a noisy Thursday morning.

The kitchen is a whirl of activity, all excited high-pitched voices and the clatter of silverware on plates and the occasional shouted protest when someone pulls someone else's hair. There's good-bye kisses and _don't forget your lunches_ and _say good-bye to your dad before you go_ and little jumper-clad arms wrapping around Rose's neck, followed by _love you, Mum._

The sound of small feet in large boots tromping through the front hallway ends with the _thunk_ of the front door closing – and then it's just Rose, her newspaper, and her cup of tea, sitting together at the kitchen table in a stolen moment of silence.

Of course, that's when the Doctor's voice cuts through it.

"Do you know just how unlikely this is?" He sounds thoughtful, and the words roll off his tongue slowly, leisurely, like he's analyzing the taste of each one as he pronounces it.

Rose doesn't look up from her paper, more out of a desire to be contrary than genuine disinterest. "What, the girls getting to school on time? Pretty bloody unlikely, I should think." She takes a sip of tea before hazarding a glance at the Doctor.

He's leaning up against the doorframe that connects the kitchen to the hallway, arms folded and one leg crossed at the knee. He's only half-dressed for the day – stocking feet, suit trousers, and a rumpled henley.

His hair is mussed and damp from the shower, his face is covered with morning stubble, and Rose loves him so much she almost can't breathe.

The Doctor smiles crookedly. "No, not that. I just mean – this. All of this. We've got _children_, and a _house_, with doors and carpets and things, and my hands are starting to shake when I try to thread feedback wires through a temporal loop stabilizer–"

It sounds like the sort of thing that ought to come out sounding panicked, and perhaps a decade ago it might have – might have been accompanied by the Doctor running his hands through his hair, by him pacing back and forth across the room, flustered and anxious.

But there's no alarm in the Doctor's voice. Even though Rose knows they still scare him a bit – all these human things, these _roots_, these things he couldn't just walk away from even if he wanted to – she knows he loves them too. She could see it in the way he looked at their eldest daughter when she was born, can hear it in his voice when he tries to explain to a seven-year-old with her hair and his eyes why the TARDIS is bigger on the inside, can taste it in the way he kisses her, still as hungry for taste and touch and contact now as he's ever been.

"What's brought this on?" Rose asks. The Doctor does love a good bit of waxing philosophical, but it's usually on topics like the brilliance of humanity, or the way quantum physics is a metaphor for life, or how what kind of jam you fancy says whether you're trustworthy or not. She takes a moment to observe him over the top of her newspaper before musing, "You found another gray hair, didn't you?"

The Doctor scowls. "Two, actually." Then he uncrosses one arm to point a finger at her, shaking it in emphasis. "But I had a _point_, Rose Tyler, and I won't be distracted from it."

Rose just _hmmms_ and takes another sip of tea, giving him an expectant look.

The Doctor clears his throat, as if preparing for a Very Important Speech. "We were born on two different planets, _centuries_ apart – or on the same planet, a few decades apart, depending on your definition of _born_ – and I survived a war I shouldn't have and stumbled into a basement where you shouldn't have been, and followed a disembodied plastic arm to a place you just happened to live, and you just happened to save my life. And then I asked you to come travel with me, and you said _no_–" The Doctor pauses for a moment to _tsk_ at her before continuing. "–so I had to ask _twice_, which I never do, Rose Tyler."

Rose nods as the Doctor – who has begun to talk with his hands as well as his voice, gesticulating enthusiastically while speaking – continues to ramble. "But the second time you came with me, and we had all of these _brilliant_ adventures, which we somehow managed to survive, something I've come to appreciate as quite the feat on your part after a decade with this body, with these primitive circulatory and respiratory systems." He gestures to himself in illustration, and Rose is about to make a cheeky comment about what exactly she'd like to do to that body when his face falls abruptly.

"Then I lost you," he says quietly. "For what should have been for good. But you wouldn't have that. You _found_ me, even when it ought to have been completely impossible, and then – then this happened. One heart. One life." The Doctor waves helplessly at himself again, and Rose has to take a moment for herself to wonder – for the thousandth time since he said _I could spend it with you, if you want_ – at the fact that she's sitting here. That she's staring at the _Doctor,_ with laugh lines on his face and the faintest bit of gray at his temples, leaning up against the doorjamb in the kitchen of the house they share. That there's a plain gold band on her left ring finger that matches the one on his, even if they're both tarnished from years of lab work and Torchwood field missions and cleaning up after small children.

"It's just –" The Doctor splutters a little, searching for words with uncharacteristic speechlessness. "Do you know what the _odds_ are, against all this? How many times and ways it could have gone wrong?" There's a bit of panic in his voice now, an edge of desperate fear, of _what-if_, and it breaks Rose's heart a little.

"Never tell me the odds," she quips, trying to lighten the mood.

The Doctor doesn't seem to hear her, though. "They're _infinitesimal_, Rose, I've done all the maths. It's just–" He looks right at her, in that way he has that sends chills right down to Rose's toes. "–it's just hard to believe it's _real_, sometimes, because it _shouldn't_ be. Because the universe isn't that kind. Not to me."

The look on his face – it's wonder and terror, resignation and hope, over a decade of love and loss and fragile human happiness – and it pulls Rose up and out of her chair, draws her across the room towards the Doctor like a magnet.

She cups one of his cheeks in her hand and he leans into the touch, pressing a kiss to the skin of her palm almost absentmindedly. "It's _real_, Doctor. Promise." Rose slips her arms around the Doctor's neck, and his arms come up reflexively, resting on her waist. "Would you like me to demonstrate–" She presses a kiss to his throat, tongue darting out to lick at the skin, and smirks when he groans. "–just _how_ real?"

He barely has time to get out _oh, yes_ before it's swallowed up by her mouth.

Hands move up from her waist and down from his neck, tracing the waistband of his trousers and running over the skin at the small of her back. The Doctor backs her up against the other side of the doorframe, lean lines pressed against soft curves, and they're so wrapped up in the kiss that they don't hear the signs. They don't hear the key turning in the lock of the front door, or the pairs of boots clumping down the front hallway, or the sound of one small voice telling another _you've got to stop forgetting your lunch, muffin-head._

The shrieks, though – those, they hear.

One of her daughters groans _"Mum, again?"_ while the other squeaks _"Dad!"_, and Rose muffles her laugh in the skin of the Doctor's neck.


End file.
